Computer technology has made it possible for business enterprises to store and retrieve enormous quantities of information. For example, healthcare enterprises are increasingly dependent on computer information systems to store and retrieve medical information for patients. Such patient medical information may include text information and image data.
Due to the volume of information and the need to maintain security, patient medical records are often stored in a separate data storage system, such as a server or other computer system. The healthcare enterprise may use computers to communicate with the data storage system to retrieve desired records or documents. For example, the computer may employ a search engine application to find the desired information on the data storage system or a network. Typically, a user who has an idea of the type of information desired enters one or more search terms into a search engine. The search engine then returns a list of documents that the search engine has determined includes the user-specified search terms. If the search engine is searching a network, it may return a list of network locations (e.g., uniform resource locators (URLs)) that the search engine has determined includes an electronic document or web page relating to the user-specified search terms. The search engines typically list the documents and/or network locations based on some type of a relevancy ranking.
The relevancy ranking is an estimate of the likelihood that a given electronic document or a given electronic document at given network location is related to the user-specified search terms in comparison to other electronic documents. However, relevancy ranking algorithms often include rankings for documents with false negatives and/or false positives. A false negative occurs when a relevant document is not identified as relevant. A false positive occurs when an irrelevant document is listed as relevant. Moreover, ranking algorithms are often complex and require using grammar rules and/or syntax parsing to rank documents, which can require significant processing time.